Cisco Systems Inc.

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Connecting Cisco with critical customer solutions

As the global leader in networking, Cisco strives to create lasting customer relationships by transforming the way people connect, communicate, and collaborate.

To build and maintain the relationships that drive its business, it is imperative that Cisco employees are able to make sense of not only their data, but also their customers’ data. Cisco offers a broad array of products, each with its own release schedule. To complicate matters, Cisco customers also have multiple products and release schedules. This creates complexity with respect to support and maintenance for individual customers.

With nearly 500 million lines of complex data, Cisco employees needed an easy and effective way to transform customer and sales data into actionable business intelligence.

Wanted: A self-service solution for actionable business insights

“The IT team was sitting on mountains of rich data — information that could empower individuals throughout the company,” said Demian Barshay,
Manager, Operations, Cisco.

“We needed a resource that would not only provide visualization and easy access to data, but more importantly, allow employees to transform data into meaningful information and new actionable business insights.”

After a five-year test period spent searching and reviewing business intelligence products, Cisco selected and deployed QlikView® to employees in sales operations and in the virtual sales force.

“After exploring several BI platforms, it was clear QlikView best fit our needs,” said Barshay. “We were impressed by the user-friendly nature of the product and the intuitive ability to perform ‘wild card’ searches against large amounts of data in real time.”

Consolidated, connected, and highly cost-efficient

Cisco consolidated its data from Oracle, Hadoop and Teradata into QlikView, then created a dashboard that made it easy for users to access, view, and discover insights. Once the sales teams realized how easy it was to rapidly analyze and visualize useful data discoveries, the QlikView dashboard became an indispensible, go-to resource.

In addition to being able to better identify new revenue opportunities, the sales force was now able to significantly reduce the time needed to identify potential risks in the operation of a customer’s network — and act faster to avoid potential problems.

“QlikView provides a competitive advantage that allows us to take data from the ‘ivory tower’ and make it accessible to the average person,” said Barshay. “It is regarded as the primary opportunity platform for services in our organization and has been a total game changer.”

Since deploying QlikView, Cisco has reported a significant return on its investment (ROI). The company has saved more than $4 million dollars to date and generated more than $100 million in additional revenue from the support and service contracts they are now able to monitor and quickly address.

QlikView has changed Cisco’s game by helping them to better manage customer success.